About us

Ethan Ligon is an Associate Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. He has conducted studies on vulnerability, risk sharing, agricultural contracts, and intra-household allocation in Ecuador, Paraguay, the Philippines, and China.

Pierre Biscaye is a Ph.D. Student at the University of California Berkeley studying Agricultural and Resource Economics, with a focus on development and behavioral economics. His prior research spans topics in agricultural development, financial inclusion, development policy, and gender equality, and my primary current interest is in studying the dynamics around the adoption of new digital technologies and women's empowerment, particularly in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa. He has wide international experience, spending 11years growing up in West Africa and Cambodia and later living and working in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Kenya, Malawi, and Tanzania, supporting literacy and food security projects.

David I. Levine is a Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. His work examines how industrialization has affected children in newly industrializing nations, particularly Indonesia. He has also conducted evaluations in Cambodia, Ghana, Kenya, and Senegal, exploring the impacts of programs promoting micro-health insurance, hunger alleviation, safe water, and solar ovens. levine@haas.berkeley.edu

Samuel Muhula is the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Research Manager at Amref Health Africa, Kenya, and a part-time lecturer in statistical data analysis at Amref International University. He is currently pursuing his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Epidemiology at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), Kenya. Muhula has over 10years of experience evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of health development programs in Africa, monitoring program performance, designing operations research, and implementing scientific studies.

Chad Hazlett is an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in Statistics and Political Science. His work focuses on developing research methods that enable researchers across disciplines to more feasibly make credible causal inferences from observational data. He has substantive interests in civil war, mass atrocity, and other forms of large-scale violence, and homelessness.

Aleksandra Jakubowski is a Postdoctoral Fellow working on the Policy Engagement Initiative under the mentorship of Ted Miguel. Her work revolves around developing a set of demand-driven research studies in close collaboration with government partners in low- and middle-income countries. Aleks’s training and research interests are at the intersection of public policy and economics. Her dissertation evaluated the impact of large-scale malaria and HIV interventions in sub-Saharan Africa on health and mortality trends, as well as downstream effects on economic functioning. After her Ph.D., she was a postdoc at Stanford University. Aleks has a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MPH from Columbia University.

Ketki Sheth is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Merced. Her research focuses on gender, financial access, education, and health in low-income countries. A few of her research projects include understanding participation in community-based health insurance, the role of female teachers in closing the gender gap in education, and the interactions of informal financial products in rural India.

Pascaline Dupas is an Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford University. Her areas of research are applied microeconomics and development economics. Dupas also founded TAMTAM Africa, a non-profit organization that provides insecticide-treated nets to pregnant women through rural prenatal clinics. She is currently conducting field experiments in health, education, and microfinance in Kenya, Ghana, and Morocco.

Julius Rüschenpöhler is a Posdoctoral Fellow at CEGA working on the Long- Term Impact Discovery Project under the supervision of Ted Miguel, Craig McIntosh, and Prashant Bharadwaj. Julius is broadly interested in research at the intersection of development economics and psychology. His research has focused on business growth in micro- and small enterprises and encompasses, in particular, work on business practices, aspirations, and risk-taking among small subsistence enterprises in Indonesia. Julius holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Tilburg University, and an M.Sc. in Behavioural Economics from the University of Warwick.

Levi Boxell is a PhD student in economics at Stanford University and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His primary research interests are in political economy and development. Prior to entering the doctoral program at Stanford, Boxell worked as a research assistant for Professors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro.

Vincent Amanor-Boadu is an Agribusiness Economics & Management Professor at Kansas State University. He holds an M.S.c from Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Nigeria and a P.h.D from the Department of Agricultural Economics and Business, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Vincent Amanor-Boadu’s research and outreach efforts encompass business development and entrepreneurship, technology and innovation, and strategic management, with emphasis on inter-organizational relationships. Vincent is currently conducting research in small business development and agricultural value chains in Zambia, Tanzania and Malawi and leading the Monitoring, Evaluation and Technical Support Services (METSS) for the Economic Growth Office of USAID|Ghana. Vincent also teaches Economics and Management of Food Manufacturing, Distribution and Retailing (AGEC 570) and Advanced Food and Agribusiness Management (AGEC 890). He also conducts seminars and workshops for businesses and organizations on strategic thinking and visioning, change management, and mechanisms of governance.